Blog

We've all worked with, for or alongside those people who've struggled to remember the names of fellow colleagues, can't remember who has children and only care about KPIs, and not who has delivered what to the team. But working in the wake of Covid-19 has driven the need for a better understanding of the people we work alongside and for. With the sudden disruption to teams and departments, knowing how people operate became just as important to business continuity as the systems they manage. Being a great leader means understanding more about the people within our organisations than ever before. For some people, home environments became work environments for the first time, so being sympathetic to differences became and remains, imperative.

Before you can get started on any project, you need to believe that the information that’s being used to build it on is accurate. In a heavily manual or disjointed organisation, metrics that accurately measure performance are hard to come by. If the business and the team lose faith in the project because of a lack of visibility and control of the data, the resulting inertia will scuttle the project before it’s even begun.

By FISCAL Technologies

The increase in the frequency, types and cost of invoice fraud (£93M in 2018), puts greater pressure on governance and control as the ‘eyes-on’ approval process is limited to spot checking invoice exceptions. Every organisation we speak to firmly believe that they have the systems and processes in place that ensure they don’t carry any financial risk, that they cannot be tricked into paying a fraudster. But in reality, the challenges, stresses and conflicting priorities of today’s businesses make it easy for fraudsters to gather enough tangible information about their targeted organisation to pose convincingly as their supplier. In some cases, receiving multiple payments before the fraud is discovered or when the legitimate supplier complains about non-payment of invoices. At this point, the recovery and return of funds from the fraudulent account is virtually impossible.

According to Crowe Financial Report, published by the University of Portsmouth, ‘Since 2009, losses owing to fraud have risen by 56.5%’.

Some organisations get it. They fully recognise the potential that new technology and process has to transform their business. Others, quite simply, don’t. Some still see automation only as a potentially faster way of doing business, but with added implementation and process change costs, and anyway they're quite happy the way things are – so push it to one side.
But they’re missing a trick – and it’s a much broader one than they imagine. Automation, combined with process change isn’t just a question of speed, done properly it can be a means to an altogether more efficient machine.